AI loses image fill when opening SVG

Yes, I'm well aware that AI has problems reading SVGs it creates. I have also reported to Adobe how it adds extra groups when saving SVGs that contain shapes with clipped image fills. Their responses, as I follow up, are either "it was fixed in the latest release, please upgrade" or "it will be fixed in the next release", both of which have yet to be proven true. Speaking as an experienced software developer, fixing this bug in AI should be very straightforward.

I have also seen the open time message about an SVG having too many nested groups and warning that content may be lost, and so have a Python script to remove these extraneous groups before reopening the file. The above example though does not give this warning.

My conclusion is that Adobe have intentionally decided to add those extra groups and not always warn about them in order to deter the use of AI for round-trip SVG work. Interestingly, a competing product also introduces unnecessary groups when exporting SVGs. We though have now found another product that does work well for editing SVGs and will be dropping the use of Illustrator.